Upcoming Tasks

arwild01 says:

I've been using RTM for several years now. In the beginning I didn't use due dates very well. More often then not, every task would just get assigned to "today". (Mostly so they would all stay in front of me)... anything that didn't actually get done "today" would be simply postponed to the next day.

Of course, this meant spending time postponing tasks each day. Frankly, it wasn't the best way to handle things.

Recently, I've decided to start making due dates more relevant and actually assign them to meaningful days (i.e. when I really msut absolutely get a task done by).

However this means just looking at "Today's Tasks" I might get surprised be an important task on the day it's due.

So now my default view is a smart list for tasks due this week:

dueBefore:today OR due:today OR (dueWithin:"1 week" OR due:"1 week")

However, some tasks I don't want to see until the day they are actually due. For example, I have a weekly status report due every Wednesday... I want this on my list the day it's due, but I don't want to have an item on my list everyday. Similarly, what about really important tasks that are due more than a week from now, but I want to see sooner?

Tags to the rescue! The two type of tasks get tagged with either a #wait or #warnearly. Items tagged #wait don't appear on the list until their actual due date and items tagged #warnearly show up if they are due within the month. So my smart list was modified as follows:

dueBefore:today OR due:today OR ((dueWithin:"1 week" OR due:"1 week") AND NOT tag:wait) OR ((dueWithin:"1 month" OR due:"1 month") AND tag:warnearly)